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Hrmmm…

Adam Ringel felt the stirrings of national pride at an early age. “Ever since I was a kid, I identified as a Californian, not an American,” he recalled as he sat in the back of a café in San Francisco’s Mission District during a meet-up titled “Coffee With Secessionists.”

One has to wonder where/when/IF this ends, or comes to some kind of reality. One thing is for sure, and that’s the rural sections of California are NOT happy with the urban centers. Not at all…

A lot of this centers around water rights, and water, from what I’m hearing from folks that are boots on the ground. From Hetch Hetchy, to LA water district, to the farmers being cut off from water for the smelt, HERE. A friend of mine’s father sold his farm in the central valley for pennies on the dollar five years ago, because he couldn’t get any water, and it was cost prohibitive to try to drill any wells.

I think the folks in power in CA, city folks, or those whose power depends on the votes of the city folks, will do whatever they have to do to keep the ever increasing appetite for water in the cities fed.

If a few farmers go broke, hey, that’s just the cost of doing business.

The sad part is that for what they are spending on the High Speed Rail project, they could easily build 15 desalination plants and supply all the water the cities need….

People don’t realize especially city folks that to phrase a quote from the movie *Dune 1984* “Water is Life”, they think “I turn on the faucet and the water is there”, they don’t think about it anymore than that. “And if some patriarchal white farmer goes broke, then the land gets distributed to the less fortunate and people of color, and that is a good thing.” I have seen that comment posted on a few sites that cater to the left side of the aisle.

No. It would mean CO’s water rights would need to be negotiated by the State Department of the U.S. with the State Department of the Republic of CA. CO would be essentially cut out, except for an advisory role.

As for desalinization, just spitballing, but probably because CA doesn’t have multiple nuclear plants (nor want any more along a huge active fault line – cf. Fukushima), nor do they have metric f**ktons of petrodollars laying aroud to fund it, from underground lakes of free oil to pay for the power needs of such a system. Unlike “Israel and most of the Middle East”.

The entire population of Israel, for just one example, is smaller than the number of people living just in Los Angeles County. One person in nine in the entire US lives within a half of tank of gasoline from where I’m sitting.
So this is like somebody with the IQ of Joy Behar asking why, if 600M people in Africa are starving, they don’t all just go to the drive-thru at McDonalds and Taco Bell.
Or the same sort of leftard mathematically-challenged thinking that supposes that Norway’s healthcare plan, for a paltry few million people, could equate to upscaling one for the entire US, with 330M people.

I won’t even go into the other problems, like forcibly evicting tens of thousands of people out of their multi-million dollar homes, so you could build some really horrible looking desalinization plants and nuclear reactors on beachfront property right on the coast, probably non-stop from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Which would totally fly.

Since you asked.

California splitting off is stupid, and hugely unlikely, but don’t let the political and economic realities sneak up and smack you in the head.

Even with Lunatard Moonbeam and the local Dumbocrat fruitbats running it, CA’s economy isn’t just bigger than any other state, it’s larger than that of nearly every state west of the Mississippi combined, excepting Texas. And more people in the populous counties, alone, than in any number of entire US states.

One thing that would happen is that the Upper Basin states, plus AZ and NV and Mexico, would likely push for a re-negotiation of distribution based on actual in-stream flow, rather than the short period used for the Colorado Compact as it now stands. With almost a century of data now available, a far more realistic distribution would be possible, and I suspect the upstream states, plus Mexico, would insist on the US government taking that into account when negotiations with CA began.

Well, nice, but at one time California was flush with petro-dollars, lots and lots of petro-dollars. And the Leftists looked at that money and said to themselves, “Hmmm, infrastructure or ‘social projects?” And they went to social projects.

This was back in the late 60’s.

California could have been on the leading edge of desalination and sewage water reclamation. They knew in the late 60’s that water was going to be an issue to the state in 20 to 30 years, even before the stupid smelt and snail darter bullscat. And yet they kicked the bucket down the road like all good socialists do.

My grandmother was a strong force behind the scenes in Cali starting about then. Strong FDR democrat, and she would curse the leftists for what they were doing.

The problem here has rarely been too little water, it’s one of too [email protected]#n many people.

Moonbeam’s solution both as gov. in the 70s/80s, and again now, is to pretend that more people will never come, and therefore to make no provision when they fail to meet his expectations.

His father, conversely, built dams, freeways, etc., by the hundreds, for exactly the locust-like hordes of toothless banjo-playing kinfolk that descended on the Golden State.

And those of you elsewhere, be well advised, they’ll come to your state next, and be no more “Californians” when they land there than they were when they landed here. They’re just locusts, cross-bred with feral pigs.

Don’t believe me, look up Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and Gray Davis, our famous recalled governor. We won’t even bother to consider the origins of our opportunist faux-Republican Governator.
They’re all as native to California as penguins and polar bears.

Multiply that times 10M over a generation, salt in another 5-10M illegal aliens, and a state goes from paradise to turd-world sh*thole.

And the eastern section of it is still redder than Texas on its best day, has more guns than the top four national armies on the planet, and would like nothing so much as a flaming meteor shower to take out Sacramento, the Bay Area, and the greater L.A. megopolis.

The future here is both better and worse than most of you imagine, and than more than a few of you can imagine. Things hereabouts will not go according to conventional wisdom, and never have.

The Salton Sea was accidentally created when water from the Colorado River was diverted into the desert. It’s still there today.

And if you think CA wouldn’t start diverting and draining water from Lake Tahoe five minutes after some genius thought shutting off the Colorado River was a good idea, I can get you a bill of sale for the Golden Gate Bridge, for cheap.

Ok, so the “stirrings of national pride” aren’t for the nation, but for the state?!?! Someone’s education has a few holes in it for sure!

And the guy who said that Californians are different was certainly telling the truth! What happened to the entire “diversity” mindset that being different is a positive and contributes to an improved whole?

Water IS life, and California would be hurtin’ for certain if they ever kick off on their own. Especially since long range planning doesn’t seem to exist in their vocabulary, otherwise, they would have desalination plants already being dug.

I agree with Chip about your book Calexit being scary and prophetic!!
I look at their current financial issues, and am very afraid they will want the rest of us to bale them out, like NYC back in the 70’s or early 80’s, only far worse. There were a lot of Upstate NY types who would have been happy to cut off NYC at the northern Westchester county line and push the entire city and Long Island out to sea. (Probably still are for that matter.)

I suppose if the entire state, and it’s politicians finally get to the point where they want to secede, then I think it should be done with a vote from the other states…but, they can’t do this for a year or so, and then want to come running back when it all goes bust. Make your bed, you have to sleep in it.

Bottom line: the majority of the political types there are basically hippie-dippy bat-crap crazy, and until it bothers the people in the state, nothing is going to change for the better. Which is also very scary!

The Los Angeles DWP still maintains armed guards around the taps that drained the Owens Lake nearly a century ago, because local farmers kept dynamiting the works.

The lake is now an open sod farm on dry land, and the farmers are almost entirely long gone, whereas greater L.A. is now over 10M people, between 25 and 33% of the entire state’s population. The surrounding metro area within commuting distance there is closer to 35M.

I have lived in Texas for several years, now. The strong identification with the state is something I can relate to. When I was a kid, I saw the same thing in at least parts of North Carolina, Tennessee and Arizona. The point, of course, is that such a thing is not peculiar to California, though I have to admit I’ve never seen it tied to not identifying as an American. In principle, I have no issues with it. I like self-determination. I do, however, think many of the people who support any sort of Calexit or formation of a 51st state lack the long-term political will to see it through. Some things to be considered:

1. Changes in the makeup of both houses of Congress, especially the Senate.
2. Potential changes in the power grid.
3. Water, water, water. Arizona already doesn’t like sending so much water to Socal.

That’s why it’ll never happen (even apart from it being completely impossible given the constraints of Article IV Section 3 of the US Constitution).

If CA goes, the (D)s lose 2 senators, 30-odd congressmen, and 55 electoral votes – forever.
They would be the Whigs of the 21st century, and the country would be run by Republican supermajorities for a century or more. Trump would be the least conservative president for the next 100 years, and SCOTUS would eventually vote 8-1 for the death penalty for abortions, while CCWs would be issued with driver’s licenses, at age 16.

If anything like a CalExit looked like it was going to succeed, Schumer and Pelosi would be leading the charge to get them carpet-bombed, and the ringleaders strung up on the Capitol lawn, even if they were loyal Democrat voters.

this is pretty scary. with the water issues we have down here in this part of Texas and all the outsiders (a lot of cali’s) moving in it is getting very tough to not have water restrictions year round. It’s just a matter of time before the farmers etc in this area will have to deal with the blue colored cities in this area and the use of water. Who will get the priority? It’s gonna get ugly one day.

California has the unfortunate problem of alternately having too much water and not enough. It’s struggled to plan for both. Going upstream, the population of Vegas is rocketing upwards. Sooner or later, the demand for water will reach a crisis point.

Too much? California has done nothing in the last decades to capture and store that runoff – while the population has nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the bullet train boondoggle enriches the appropriate cronies.

Right. The El Nino years cause flooding. And the state forgets to maintain their flood management system until it comes to a point: many levees failed in the late 90s and the recent debacle at Oroville. That’s what I mean by too much water.

The water wars have been on going for years in Calif, and are likely to continue until such time as there isn’t any water or state…
Those in power don’t appear to have a long range plan and those that do are leaving.

I recall that, a decade or two ago, Texas sued New Mexico to increase water flows into the state.
New Mexico was the benificiary of good water management practices and laws that had been established when the state was controlled by Mexico in the previous century.
Texas expanded without proper planning and made their poor planning New Mexico’s problem.
Sounds familiar:
Taking from those that have planned ahead by those who have not.
How would that go over at your neighborhood?

Re. California and Calexit:
Up north, here, one sees a lot of State of Jefferson signs, flags, T-shirts, etc.
Long term, we rural types are politically helpless unless we start an insurgency.
I don’t see that happening.
Life is too easy.
I live a tank of gas north of the Bay Area.
If there is an “event” that disrupts the major population centers to the south, people are not going to be heading to Mexico for food and water, so guess where the city folks are going to run out of gas?
Here. In the real Northern California not Berkley.
Undisciplined behaviour would be frowned upon unless it’s Saturday night at the VFW Hall and the band has fiddle.

Eh, be careful what you attribute to the Spanish vs. what came from the Progressive Era conservation philosophy. There are similarities, but also some serious differences that have caused a lot of trouble for folks in northern New Mexico.

Part of Texas’s problem is that the state uses two different water philosophies at the same time. The state’s water laws “just growed” instead of being planned and imposed as happened in NM and CO. And that the courts said in 1904 that they do not have the power to regulate groundwater, and they have repeated that statement. The legislatures have refused to deal with ground water. Without groundwater takings rules, you get adverse effects on in-stream flow. It’s a mess that will probably take a meteor striking Austonio to get solved.

As usual Heinlein was ahead of us all.
“There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who “love Nature” while deploring the “artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled ‘Nature'”. The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of “Nature” — but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the “Naturist” reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e., his own self-hatred. In the case of “Naturists” such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate. As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women — it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly “natural”. Believe it or not, there were “Naturists” who opposed the first flight to old Earth’s Moon as being “unnatural” and a “despoiling of Nature”.” – Time Enough for Love (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love), 1973, Robert A. Heinlein

Incidently, twenty years ago I had a client who sold small, one gallon, water distilling units. One of his clients, who lived in Santa Barbara, reported that there was a white fuzzy material remaining on the walls of his distiller after operation. He called the water district.
The residue was toilet paper from their recycling of sewage.
Just so you know.

Waepnedmann provided the hook to the story: “the town that skipped tertiary treatment”. The recycled water was cleaner than what entered in the first place, probably. Unless you need something truly cleaned out, like distilled or deionized water, you don’t find this.

The water discussion above has two assumptions that I’m not comfortable about, one natural and one human:

No major earthquake to cause damage to dams or aqueducts
No incident or “accident” destroys pumping stations, valves, or locks

“Calexit” and some current work projects made me look carefully at water sources.

I see.
You’re going to grow another coast now, I suppose.
(BTW, in just a few hundred thousand years, the San Francisco peninsula doesn’t slide into the ocean. It reaches up and blocks off the entire Oregon coast with a peninsula that’d make Portland an inland port, and doubles the available coastline in California. The Golden Gate becomes the terminus of a hundreds-miles-long bay. And Mexico loses all of Baja California, forever, because while the land moves, the latitude lines don’t. Not that any of us will live to see it, but you should know the future, and get used to it mentally.)

Portland is problematic for a host of reasons, and both OR and WA make tepid CA liberals look like pikers.

CA’s economy isn’t as big as it is because of what it imports (which helps), but because of what it does.

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and even the remaining Central Valley agriculture is enough by itself to shade the next-nearest 14 other states, and this is even after driving aerospace entirely out of the state, destroying manufacturing, crippling businesses in general, and halting all offshore oil production for 50 years.

For those of you who still don’t get it, please, continue the knee-jerk CA-bashing.

I *want* the idiots here to try this, as cutting CA off from D.C.’s subsidies will finally make the cost of Sacramento’s liberal stupidity and tolerated illegal immigration so bald-face apparent (while hastening the looming economic collapse here) that the statues of Lenin and Marx will come down all the faster, and then we get our state back.

The rest of y’all just get your toothless banjo-playing kinfolks, and Mexico gets 5-10M illegals.

It’d be like 1850 all over again.

Win-win.

And in the interim, the (D)s can’t elect another US president – ever.

You all should be sending money by the trainload to get CA kicked out of the U.S.

Cookie- The Chinese want those ports… They already OWN the Port of Long Beach. And there would still be Seattle/Vancouver. Other stuff would go through the Canal and into Houston, probably a month delay to change/move those ships. And of course costs would go up slightly.

Someone mentioned Lake Mead/Hoover Dam. They expect the power generating system to be shut down in ~3 years, IIRC. Water level is getting too low to power the turbines. Las Vegas gets ~1/3 of their electricity from there, besides most of their water. They are desperately working to steal ground water from the eastern NV farmers. I don’t think they can afford it, as the estimated cost will be ~$8 billion for the infrastructure (you know it will end up costing much more). The taxes needed will hurt the tourist business.

That’s going to be a strain on the grid to route that much power to replace Hoover.